WhatsApp2PDF is a command line utility, written in Scala, to process WhatsApp conversation dumps to formatted PDF.
Open Mac's command line terminal (Applications > Utilities > Terminal) and navigate to whatsapp2pdf, for example:
cd ~/Dropbox/whatsapp2pdf/
The simplest use case is to run the tool on a single file:
./whatsapp2pdf file.txt
This will produce file.pdf in your current directory.
You can hand whatsapp2pdf any number of files:
./whatsapp2pdf file_1.txt file_2.txt file_3.txt
Which will result in file_1.pdf, file_2.pdf, and file_3.pdf in your
current directory.
You can specify the output directory with the -o flag:
./whatsapp2pdf file.txt -o pdfs/
The only accepted input format for the text files to be converted to PDF, is a direct export of a WhatsApp conversation.
To export a conversation from WhatsApp:
- Open WhatsApp
- Navigate to the conversation
- Tap the
...button in the top right to open the conversation menu. - Select
More, the last option in the menu. - Choose
Email Conversation - If you want to include images in the resulting PDF, select
Attach media.
Note that most email providers have a limit on email sizes.
If attachments are to be included in the PDF, they need to be located in the same directory as the text file.
To build WhatsApp2PDF from source, you will need a Java Development Kit (JDK), Maven, and an internet connection. All dependencies (including the Scala compiler) will be downloaded by Maven.
With your environment all set up, the following commands will download the source code and build WhatsApp2PDF..
git clone [email protected]:connollyst/whatsapp2pdf
cd whatsapp2pdf
mvn clean package
This will produce target/whatsapp2pdf.jar